Home Emergency Preparedness Guide

EDC Prepping Program is a guide that had been created to help the users with preparing for any emergency. It is packed with various methods that will help them to prepare for any emergency. With it, the users will learn how to prepare for each and every one of the 41 everyday emergencies including rape, choking to car crashes, riots, fainting to surviving a burning building. The methods are easy to learn and easy to understand that the users will not need to spend a lot of days with it. It has the effect that makes it looks as if the users have learnt all the methods for so long.It comes with various bonuses. Some of these bonuses are the Ebooks; 'Simple Self-Defense', The Gun Factor, Prep Under the Radar, Getting Home When Shtfit is a digital product that comes with both EBook and Videos.It is different for everyone. Some people only want a simple means of getting to that picnic. While others want to get prepared for a rainy day. Everyone has their own reasons and this guide addresses them all.When you use this product, you will become a subject matter expert on dealing with an emergency in days not months. Read more...

ProtectingAmerica.org is committed to finding better ways to prepare for and protect American families from the devastation caused by natural catastrophes. I co-chair the organization with James Lee Witt, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and our coalition members include the American Red Cross, other first responder groups, emergency management officials, insurers, municipalities, small businesses, Fortune 100 companies and private citizens. The membership is broad and diverse and includes members from virtually every state in the nation. ProtectingAmerica.org was formed to raise the national awareness about the important responsibility we all have to prepare and protect consumers, families, businesses and communities from natural disasters. We are building a campaign to create a comprehensive, national catastrophe management solution that protects homes and property at a lower cost, improves preparedness and reduces the financial burden on consumers and...

Men and women are affected differently in all phases of a disaster, from exposure to risk and risk perception to preparedness behaviour, warning communication and response physical, psychological, social and economic impacts emergency response and ultimately to recovery and reconstruction (Fothergill, 1998). Natural disasters have been shown to result in increased domestic violence against, and post-traumatic stress disorders in, women (Anderson and Manuel, 1994 Garrison et al., 1995 Wilson et al., 1998 Ariyabandu and Wickramasinghe, 2003 Galea et al., 2005). Women make an important contribution to disaster reduction, often informally through participating in disaster management and acting as agents of social change. Their resilience and their networks are critical in household and community recovery (Enarson and Morrow, 1998 Ariyabandu and Wickramasinghe, 2003). After the 1999 Orissa cyclone, most of the relief efforts were targeted at or through women, giving them control over...

Munich Re has one of the world's largest global databases on natural catastrophes, the Munich Re NatCatSERVICE. Currently, it contains entries for more than 23,000 individual natural events which have caused human suffering and or property losses. Figure 21.1 shows the development in the number of great natural disasters (causing billion dollar losses and or thousands of fatalities) since 1950, broken down into the different perils floods, windstorms, geophysical disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions) and other weather-related events (heatwaves, forest fires, droughts), tte figure clearly shows a steep increase in the number of such events. While in the 1950s there were about two of them per year, the expected value has now risen to about seven. Most of the trend is driven by weather-related disasters, whereas there has been only a small trend upwards as far as geophysical events are concerned. Fig. 21.1. Development of the number of Great Natural Disasters between 1950...

It is quite unfortunate, but if you look at investments in mitigation or adaption, you find that they always follow natural disasters. Even the implication of the USA in international negotiations was related to the drought in the central US in the 1980s. Disasters are striking events, everybody realizes his own vulnerability, this helps making decisions. But there are two problems and I will discuss the one related to adaptation first. The second point is more related to climate change impacts and the need to mitigation. If natural hazards change everywhere on the planet in response to climate change, you can basically think of two scenarios. One scenario is the most optimistic we anticipate the changes in climate and hazards, and we change the way we manage risks to limit disasters. The second scenario, the worse one, is that we do not anticipate but act only after disasters. In that scenario we would need one disaster in every location to prompt action, just to help people realize...

EPCRA22 is intended to help communities prepare to respond in the event of a chemical emergency, and to increase the public's knowledge of the presence and threat of hazardous chemicals. To this end, EPCRA requires the establishment of state and local committees to prepare communities for potential chemical emergencies. The focus of the preparation is a community emergency response plan that must

Development of economic and insured losses in India from Natural Disasters between 1980 and 2005 (Datafrom Munich Re NatCatSERVICE) Fig. 21.4. Development of economic and insured losses in India from Natural Disasters between 1980 and 2005 (Datafrom Munich Re NatCatSERVICE)

Strangelove. It was made back in 1964, when the biggest global threat was nuclear Armageddon. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, and starring Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove, a wheelchair-bound caricature of Henry Kissinger, the film was a satire of the military strategy known as Mutual Assured Destruction or MAD, for short. The plot involved the Soviet Union's building the ultimate defense, a doomsday device in the remote wastes of Siberia. If Russia were attacked, the device would shroud the world in a radioactive cloud and destroy all human and animal life on earth. Unfortunately, the Soviet generals forgot to tell the Americans about this, and, needless to say, Dr. Strangelove and the American military attacked. The film ends with a deranged U.S. officer (played by Slim Pickens) sitting astride a nuclear bomb as it is released into the sky above Siberia. The end of the world is nigh, as the credits roll. Now our most feared global Armageddon is climate...

Since time immemorial, climate variability and change have triggered natural disasters and climate extremes causing heavy losses of life and property, forcing civil society to learn to live with these calamities. Floods, droughts, hurricanes, storm surges, heat waves precipitating wild fires and such other natural calamities have claimed more than 2.8 million lives all over the world in the past 25 years, adversely affecting 828 million people. Damage caused by these climate extremes during the same period was estimated at 25-100 billion dollars, dramatically affecting agriculture and forestry systems in regions where these have occurred.

The AGU was established in 1919 by the National Research Council and for more than 50 years operated as an unincorporated affiliate of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1972 the union was incorporated in the District of Columbia and membership was opened to scientists and students worldwide. The AGU offers to its members a wide range of publications, meetings, and educational and other activities that support research in the Earth and space sciences. Many AGU members are involved in crucial research for the future of the planet on issues such as global warming, climate change, ozone depletion, natural hazards, water supply and quality, and other environmental factors. The AGU's membership includes many of the world's foremost geoscientists from industry, academia, and government. Adopted in December 2003, Human Impacts on Climate is the AGU's official statement on global warming. They explicitly argue that human activities are increasingly altering the Earth's climate and the level...

The first hour shows Gore explaining how the climate went out of control in just a few years. Graphs, photographs, data, short films, and anecdotes are shown. From the beginning, the film mentions a national disaster from 2005, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, as a patent case of a tragedy that was not considered very important by the U.S. Government. At some point in the argument, these terrible events in New Orleans are presented as the direct consequence of the global warming. It also explains that the administration in Washington, D.C., does not seem to be fully aware of the danger of global warming to U.S citizens.

Globalisation of the economy has led to greater dependency on oil, due to the ever-increasing demand for petroleum fuels and more generally fossil fuels. We have recently seen that the global economy could cope reasonably well with an increase in the cost of energy. In contrast however, an interruption, even temporary, in oil supplies would cause a major crisis.

Wildland fires are increasing in many parts of the world due to increased human pressure and an apparent increase in the severity of climatic conditions leading to large catastrophic fires. Although attribution is difficult, the observed warming of the planet during the past two decades has been coincident with an increase in fires in ecosystems ranging from the tropics to the boreal forests during the last two decades (e.g., Agee, 1993 Prins and Menzel, 1994 Larsen, 1996). Partly as a result of these natural disasters, policy makers and scientists are gaining appreciation for the values at risk from fire as well as the ecological importance of fire. The use of prescribed fire to sustain ecosystems, prevent catastrophes, and manage natural resources is on the increase in many countries of the world. Also, of course, the use of fire to clear forests for conversion to agriculture, especially in the tropics, continues at an alarming rate.

The first is that on an average per capita basis, the world today produces more than enough food to meet caloric requirements, and that this success has been based mostly on yield gains over the last half century. Perhaps first popularized by Thomas Malthus in the early 1800s, the question of whether the world can produce enough food to feed a growing population has been a perennial concern. Thus far, technology has mostly precluded Malthusian doomsday predictions of population-driven food shortages. Through the first half of the last century, the need for increased food production was met by expansion of cropped area. But beginning in about the 1950s, when population and income growth were adding increasing pressure to global food markets, large-scale sustained investment in crop productivity greatly increased yields of crops throughout the developing world. This so-called Green Revolution allows the world today to produce 170 more cereals on just 8 more cropped area than 50 years...

As in many other cases of natural disasters, there are flood prone areas that nevertheless have to be used for agricultural production. Flood control and management are the starting points of any flood preparedness initiatives in development planning (e.g. Lohani and Acharya in Sahni and Ariyabandu 2003). tte most obvious improvements are large scale flood water detention or flood diversion attempts for agricultural purposes (Stigter et al. 2003a). It must also be clear that such calamities as for example happen in China around its Yangtze river with a not negligible frequency (Winchester 1996) can hardly be met with any production adaptation strategy although annual flooding can be agriculturally used (Stigter et al. 2003a). Flood resistant construction techniques are discussed by Dhameja in Sahni and Ariyabandu (2003) and Ariyabandu indicates in Sahni and Ariyabandu (2003) that a demand driven approach to address substantial issues in vulnerabilities of communities like that of...

Like floods they are among the highest relative intensities of natural disasters, and wind calamities are often occurring in combination with floods (Viet 2002). However, floods are getting much more attention than winds in planning for coping with damage due to cyclones, due to higher vulnerability to floods in most instances, with forests as an exception (Viet 2002). ttis is in line with little attention for damage to buildings in wind disasters in Africa (e.g. Wisse and Stigter 2007), but Dhameja gives several pages in Sahni and Ariyaban-du (2003) of points that are of importance for constructions that may be exposed to cyclones.

Recovery is likewise a normal issue of perpetually ongoing successional processes in biotic communities. Not only natural disasters such as hurricane or fire but also the fall of a large tree can set out ecological succession starting with population growth in pioneer species - their recovery after a reduction in the period of relative ecological stability - and leading, through a sequence of several species, to the recovery of dominant climax species.

This scenario provides the basis for chapter 6 in this volume, by Sharon E. Burke, on catastrophic consequences of climate change for national and international security through the end of the twenty-first century. On the basis of current scientific understanding, we assume that abrupt, global catastrophic climate events cannot plausibly occur in the next three decades, but could plausibly do so over the course of this century. To examine the consequences of such events, scenario 3 extends the rapid warming and attendant accelerated impacts associated with scenario 2 to the end of the twenty-first century, leading to assumed rapid loss of polar land ice, abrupt 2-meter (6.6-foot) sea level rise, and the collapse of the North Atlantic MOC. We therefore assume warming that is double the best estimate of modeled surface warming under emissions scenario A1B for the year 2100 (see table 3-1).

Use of improved climate and weather information and forecasts along with efficient early warning systems would contribute to the preparedness for extreme weather events. New technologies have brought about an accelerated increase in our knowledge of the climate system. Today the accuracy of forecasts of large-scale weather patterns for seven days in advance is the same as those for two days in advance only 25 years ago. tte accuracy of tropical cyclone track forecasts and the timeliness of warnings have been steadily improving in the past few years. When properly communicated and absorbed, early warnings may empower farmers and communities threatened by natural hazards to prepare themselves in sufficient time and in an appropriate manner so as to minimize the risk of the impending hazard. Technologically oriented early warning, integrated with field data on crop and livestock conditions, price movements, human welfare etc. is for example crucial for tracking drought, its onset, its...

Cities face all the challenges that any other sector encounters in regard to adaptation, but research on urban adaptation has only recently begun in earnest. Attention to date has focused on infrastructure and strategies such as emergency preparedness and response. In addition, where resource stresses have already mounted, such as water shortages in the American West, local and regional entities have begun planning to address their vulnerability to climate change in the context of specific natural

Treating environmental impacts as market externalities is part of a prosaic reformist repertoire, which also includes administrative measures (such as banning particular practices or products) and limited pragmatic efforts at democratic decision-making, for example through policy consultations or planning procedures. 'Survivalist' environmen-talism, which calls for zero economic growth and a planned economy run by an enlightened elite, Dryzek identifies as prosaic (in that it merely wishes to freeze industrialism's advance) but also radical since zero economic growth implies a wholesale redistribution of political and economic power. The imaginative discourses of environmental politics, for Dryzek, are labelled 'sustainability', 'ecological modernisation' (both of which seek ways to dissolve the conflicts between economic and environmental values) and 'green radicalism'. Romantic and rationalist green radical discourses question the basic structure of industrial society and advance...

Main causes of vulnerability in the region are the fast and un-regulated urbanization, rural and urban poverty, deterioration of natural resources, inefficient public policies, and the delays and mistakes in infrastructure investments. In the region, there is little investment concerning mitigation of natural hazards and the response is mainly under emergency situations.

These production methods may induce instability in the hydrate rich sediments. The likely mechanism is that hydrate decomposition at the base of the hydrate stability zone convert consolidated sediments into loose gas-charged sediments. This causes a decrease in the shear strength and facilitates the occurrence of landslides, tsunamis or other natural disasters, such as the 1986 Lake Nyos disaster (Rogers, 1996). After massive landslides on the continental slopes, mud volcano eruptions could cause massive hydrate dissociation and the release of CH4 into the atmosphere, which would contribute to climate change. Natural gas pipelines laid from production platforms to shore may warm sea floor sediments and decompose surrounding hydrates. A concern of the oil and gas industry is also the fact that drilling through hydrate zones might destabilize supporting foundations for platforms and production wells. Disruptions to the ocean floor from hydrate decomposition could also result in surface...

Generally, demonstration studies in climate forecast application are targeting vulnerable areas, which tend to ensure receptivity, participation and commitment of local institutions and community in climate risk management. As beneficial use of climate forecasts depends on high level of human vulnerability, climate predictability and decision capacity (Hansen 2002), demonstration studies automatically target areas satisfying the above criteria. A demonstration study also tries to generate localized climate information, understanding the decision profiles and needs of the farmers. A demonstration study implemented by Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre (ADPC) in collaboration with International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) has followed a well organized sequential process that include (i) understanding climate variability and impact at local level (ii) farmers need perception, (iii) enabling elements in decision-making environment favoring climate forecast uptake,...

Some flooding events are massive, covering with water hundreds of thousands of acres along the entire floodplain of a river system. These floods tend to rise slowly and may have high water for weeks or even months. History has shown that many levees fail during regional long-term flooding events, because most levees are designed to hold back high water for only a short time. The longer the water remains high, the more the water pressure acts on the levee, slowly forcing the water into the pores, letting the water seep into and under it. This often causes levee failure and explains why so many levees fail in long-term regional floods. Long-term flooding events can affect hundreds of thousands or millions of people, and cause widespread disease, famine, loss of jobs, and displacement of populations as a result of the disaster. Floods of this magnitude are among the costliest of all natural disasters.

Recent storms have already revealed the intrinsic potential for disaster in this region. For example, the nor'easter of December 1992 flooded the entrance of the Hoboken train station with seawater, short-circuiting the electric trains and city subways and shutting down the underground public transportation system for up to ten days. The Brooklyn-Battery tunnel experienced serious flooding as did the FDR Highway on Manhattan's east side. Fortunately, no lives were lost, but there would have been fatalities if the sea had risen another 30 cm (US Army Corps of Engineers et al, 1995). During the 21st century, rising sea level will aggravate the effects of storm surges and wave damage along the Metropolitan New York, Long Island and northern New Jersey coastlines, leading to more severe and more frequent flooding. An abrupt acceleration in the pace of climate change would accelerate sea level rise and make infrastructure protection measures and emergency planning imperatives even more...

Though it is difficult or even impossible to quantify the real monetary costs of affecting climate change, climate change will have great impact on society, population densities (out migration and in migration), agriculture, infrastructure, manufacturing, and intergovernmental relations. These effects will bear more intensely on the poor than those wealthy enough to adapt and prosper from climate change. The cost of doing nothing is high. This can be seen in the cost of catastrophic natural disasters that pale in comparison to the potential catastrophes that even the most conservative climate change models project. The total cost of catastrophic storm damage in the United States 1980-2005 is estimated to be in excess of 560 billion, with Hurricane Katrina alone causing between 150- 200 billion in economic damage. Worldwide natural catastrophes cost another 220 billion.

A great deal, accordingly, depends on how and how well we repair and enhance the capacity of government to do what only governments can do. The market is the arena in which we say I and mine and in which we act mostly for near-term advantage. Government is one in which we come together to say we and ours, in order to protect and enhance our common interests immediately and over the long term. Markets seldom act for the enduring public good governments can and must. But a great deal of our commonwealth, common property, and capacity to act collectively has been squandered in the past four decades, diminishing our democratic heritage and reducing our capacity to respond collectively to the kinds of emergencies that will become more common in the future. The miserable performance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the wake of Katrina and more recently the total failure of regulation that culminated in the bankruptcies of major financial institutions, for example, were the...

A number of charities and think tanks have followed suit, claiming that 1 billion people could be forced to leave their homes over the next 50 years as the effects of climate change exacerbate an already serious 'migration crisis' (Christian Aid, 2007). 'Natural disasters, together with the effects of resource stripping, have displaced millions' (Conisbee and Simms, 2003). Although there are no conclusive global figures on the number of people who are at risk of displacement, Professor Norman Myers suggests that in 1995 there were at least 25 million people displaced for environmental reasons over and above the 27 million 'traditional refugees', and 'when global warming takes hold, there could be as many as 200 million people' (Myers, 2005).

Such 'restrictivist' policies therefore reflect a misguided and incomplete understanding of migration. Distinguishing migration into neat 'economic', 'political' or 'environmental' categories is misleading and detrimental to the cause of such vulnerable people. Migrants can be all of these things and more, and the extent to which they can be pigeon holed as 'forced' or 'voluntary' is not always clear since people move for a multitude of complex and multilayered reasons. The migrant experience can be both out of compulsion (e.g. fear of political persecution as well as economic deprivation due to natural disasters and so on) and a degree of choice (although the extent to which that choice is meaningful depends upon the immediacy and scale of the threats faced by migrants).

Drought is a climatic hazard that occurs in almost every region of the world. It causes physical suffering, economic losses, and degradation of the environment. A drought is a creeping phenomenon, and it is very difficult to determine when a dry spell becomes a drought or when a severe drought becomes an exceptional drought. It is slower and less dramatic than other natural disasters, but its effects are long lasting and widespread.

Severity of such destructive natural events reduces their consequences significantly. Communities can use this information to plan evacuations, strengthen buildings, and make detailed plans of what needs to be done in natural disasters to such a degree that their costs have been greatly reduced. Increased government responsibility accompanies this greater understanding. Formerly society hardly looked to government for aid in natural disasters. For instance, nearly 10,000 people perished in a hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas, on September 8, 1900, yet since there were no warning systems in place, no one was at blame. In 2001 two feet (0.6 m) of rain with consequent severe flooding hit the same area, and nobody perished, but billions of dollars of insurance claims were filed. When Hurricane Ike hit Galveston in 2008, most people evacuated and the loss of life was minimal. Public perception of natural hazards and disasters has changed with the development of warning and protection...

RCRA is only one of several regulatory programs in place to protect the environment. The RCRA regulations work closely with other environmental statutes such as the Clean Air Act (CAA) Clean Water Act (CWA) the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act (MPRSA) the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) and the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

Applications of geospatial technologies for disaster management include emergency preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. Geospatial technologies could have improved the characterization of geophysical, topographical, geological, and sociological factors important for mitigating the disastrous effects of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010. Theilen-Willige (2010) used a GIS weighted overlay approach to produce maps representative of areas where factors affecting surface-near earthquake shock waves that aggregate and interfere with each other resulting in increasing vulnerability to soil amplification. This information in turn was used to create landslide and flooding susceptibility maps. By integrating the predictive products developed by Theilen-Willige with GIS base layers that spatially describe population distributions and the built environment, mitigation strategies could have been developed that could have saved many lives and could have...

Recent climate-related extreme weather events have been associated with cost estimates for countries and economic sectors and trends in these costs have been examined, especially by the reinsurance industry (e.g., Swiss Re, 2004 Munich Re, 2005 also Chapter 1, Section 1.3.8). According to these estimates, an increase in the intensity and or frequency of weather-based natural disasters, such as hurricanes, floods or droughts, could be associated with very large costs to targeted regions in terms of economic losses and losses of life and disruptions of livelihoods, depending on such variables as the level of social and economic development, the economic value of property and infrastructure affected, capacities of local institutions to cope with the resulting stresses, and the effective use of risk reduction strategies. Estimates of impacts on a relatively small country's GDP in the year of the event range from 4 to 6 (Mozambique flooding Cairncross and Alvarinho, 2006) to 3 (El Ni o in...

But it is not yet clear whether the tsunami response will be remembered in thirty years' time as defining or as an exceptional case. As the world looks to the United States for assistance with greater frequency, and when disaster strikes in places where the U.S. military could be greeted with some hostility, executing relief missions will become increasingly complex and dangerous. The roles of the U.S. Army and National Guard will also need to evolve. At present, National Guard troops are responsible for responding to domestic natural disasters when needed, yet their deployment overseas (for either military or relief operations) can leave the United States short of troops and equipment precisely when climate change will be causing more extreme weather events domestically. Furthermore, regular Army and Marine Corps troops may need to receive training in how to provide disaster relief in potentially hostile environments, perhaps as part of a post-Iraq focus on developing the skill sets...

The IEA, headquartered in Paris, France, has five major offices the Executive Office, Energy Technology and Research and Development, Long-term Cooperation and Policy Analysis, Office of Global Energy Dialogue, and Oil Markets and Emergency Preparedness. A staff of 150 comes from member countries, and is made up of scientists, statisticians, and management personnel.

On-farm applications to cope with agrometeorological risks and uncertainties cannot be defined objectively without detailed description of all the external and internal driving forces, related events, direct and indirect impacts, consequential effects, available technology and resources, and farmer's implementation ability, governmental supporting system and national infrastructure. Nevertheless, it may be practiced through an ordinary farm management system when combined or linked together with an appropriate early warning system for natural hazards, if available, tte creation of data archives and information bases are essential to decision making as well as research on hazards and warning systems. Components of an early warning system include observation, detection, monitoring, assessment, forecasting, warning, projection and, valuation.

Tte establishment of early warning systems and associated preparedness and response systems in agricultural managements has been an important contributor to the progressive prevention and reduction of natural hazards in agricultural production. ttis is true for drought and famine-affected regions, as well as for developed countries where early warning systems, and preparedness, mitigation and risk transfer measures are generally well developed.

Although future climate change seems to be marginally important when compared to other development issues (Davidson et al., 2003), it is clear that climate change and variability, and associated increased disaster risks, will seriously hamper future development. On an annual basis, for example, developing countries have already absorbed US 35 billion in direct losses from natural disasters (Mirza, 2003). However, these figures do not include livelihood assets and losses and overall emotional and other stresses that are often more difficult to assess. A challenge, therefore, is to shape and manage development that also builds resilience to shocks, including those related to climate change and variability (Davidson et al., 2003 Adger et al., 2004).

Tte establishment of early warning systems and associated preparedness and response systems in agricultural managements is an important contributor to the progressive prevention and reduction of natural hazards in agricultural production. Emergency Response System (ERS) in agricultural managements can be considered as an on-farm application for decision-making support system (DMSS) against agricultural hazards.

Several climate models forecast that the agriculture situation may improve in parts of Russia and China but some regions within both countries may suffer from production declines (United Nations Foundation and Sigma XI, 2007). The consequence of lower food production globally, combined with the disruption of climate-related natural disasters, has serious implications for national and regional security, which is dependent upon society's ability to maintain economic growth and social development. If these changes occur over long periods of time and vary from region to region, the world may have the ability to adapt to new economic development patterns. Sustained disruptions in major producing areas, however, will have global and local effects - and many of these could occur simultaneously (United Nations Foundation and Sigma XI, 2007). As the global economy's resilience to meet such challenges is predicated on maintenance of political and economic stability in the developed world,...

Although initiated by human activity, the collapse of Mt. Toc was not an unusual geological event. Giant volumes of rock fail catastrophically several times a decade, mostly in young mountain ranges and at volcanoes. The resulting landslides have normally acquired minimum velocities of 100-200 kmh-1 after collapse unless trapped by topography, as happened at Mt. Toc, they have the potential to travel large distances and to wipe out entire communities Voight (1978) . Such behaviour emerges when the collapse volume exceeds between 1 and 10 million cubic metres Hsu (1975) Melosh (1987) . Subaerial landslides have maximum recorded volumes approaching 30 km3 submarine landslides may be more than 10 times larger. The mechanical energy released is commonly between 1014 and 1017 J on land and up to at least 1019 J beneath the sea for comparison, earthquakes of Richter Magnitude 8-9 release some 1017-1018 J. The implied rates of energy release place giant, catastrophic landslides among the...

For facilities that are subject to the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA 313) reporting, the SP3 must address those areas where the listed Section 313 toxic water priority chemicals are stored, processed, or handled. These areas typically require stricter BMPs in the form of structural control measures.

The federal government heavily subsidizes the protection of the densely developed New Jersey coast. Taxpayers, through the Army Corps of Engineers, pay for shoreline erosion and beach replenishment programs. New Jersey's current plans for beach sand replenishment will cost about 60 million per mile, with a 50-year total of 9 billion. Many property owners also get subsidized insurance through the National Flood Insurance Program. Storms often result in the use of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds to rebuild in the same place, without important property modifications

As people were eventually allowed to return to their homes, new challenges emerged to healthcare delivery. These challenges were more difficult to anticipate, and less outside assistance was provided in meeting them. The challenge to the healthcare system at this stage was primarily economic, from reduced patient volumes seen despite the reduction in the total number of hospitals. The average daily census of hospital beds in the region fell by 50 during the 4 month period after the storm, from 2,500 patients to 1,237 (Louisiana Pubic Health Institute, NOLA Dashboard, and U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2006). In a free market health care system, reduced patient volume directly translates into reduced revenue, and hospitals began reporting significant financial losses. Bond ratings were lowered, limiting hospitals' ability to borrow money. While the reduced patient volumes and financial losses are easy to document, they were harder to explain. Facing this same challenge in my...

18,000 communities belonged to the program. Participating local governments require developers to meet minimum standards designed to avoid damages that might be inflicted by a catastrophic 100-year flood. The program also requires property owners to purchase flood insurance to receive a federally insured mortgage (Myers, 1996). Flood insurance is a means for placing some of the burden of losses onto the people who take (or make) the risk, namely the floodplain users and residents (Alexander, 1993). Communities can participate in a Community Rating System, established by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), that allows them to show innovative strategies to reduce flood losses in return for lower insurance premiums for floodplain residents.

Since then, the federal government including the Bureau of Reclamation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency have actively participated in the installation and maintenance of detection and warning systems. Many systems are still managed by regional or local entities, but the percentage of federal dollars has increased substantially. Standards have also been established to help make the systems more compatible across regions (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1997).

There is a body of research that argues that women are more vulnerable than men to weather-related disasters. The impacts of past weather-related hazards have been disaggregated to determine the differential effects on women and men. Such studies have been done, for example, for Hurricane Mitch in 1998 (Bradshaw, 2004) and for natural disasters more generally (Fordham, 2003). These differential impacts include numbers of deaths, and well-being in the post-event recovery period. The disproportionate amount of the burden endured by women during rehabilitation has been related to their roles in the reproductive sphere (Nelson et al., 2002). Children and elderly persons tend to be based in and around the home and so are often more likely to be affected by flooding events with speedy onset. Women are usually responsible for the additional care burden during the period of rehabilitation, whilst men generally return to their pre-disaster productive roles outside the home. Fordham (2003) has...

In the climate change context, the term 'mainstreaming' has been used to refer to integration of climate change vulnerabilities or adaptation into some aspect of related government policy such as water management, disaster preparedness and emergency planning or land-use planning (Agrawala, 2005). Actions that promote adaptation include integration of climate information into environmental data sets, vulnerability or hazard assessments, broad development strategies, macro policies, sector policies, institutional or organisational structures, or in development project design and implementation (Burton and van Aalst, 1999 Huq et al., 2003). By implementing mainstreaming initiatives, it is argued that adaptation to climate change will become part of or will be consistent with other well-established programmes, particularly sustainable development planning.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is tasked with the primary mission to reduce the loss of life and property and protect the nation from all hazards, including natural disasters. During disasters such as hurricanes, FEMA works with other organizations that are part of the nation's emergency management system, such as local emergency management agencies and the American Red Cross. They are involved in work dealing with storm surges and flooding. Computer models have been developed for coastal communities that can project various water saturation heights onto a coastal area for different hurricane categories. Computers can also simulate slow-moving and rapidly moving hurricanes in order to see the real-time potential effects of the storm. These types of computer simulations allow emergency planners to prepare evacuation and emergency preparedness plans.

Disaster preparedness plans in hospitals are indispensable for a successful completion of a hospital evacuation. Disasters like the flooding of 2002 in the Oder-Elbe-region in Germany, the South-East Asia tsunami in 2004, or the flooding of New Orleans, Louisiana, USA during hurricane Katrina in 2005, and Galveston, Texas during hurricane Ike in 2008 has let us become aware that flood catastrophes are not only documented far away from us, but they can happen everywhere and could also occur in our neighborhood. Catastrophes do not follow any rules and are barely predictable according to time and location. To become ready for catastrophic cases, it is relevant to develop localized structures, disaster plans and to establish drills. The following functional sections should be established incident commander, incident planning, logistics, administration, communication (internal, with committees and media), and security (Born et al., 2007a, 2007b Zane &amp Prestipino, 2004). At UTMB in...

The economic argument is also simple. The 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles caused total property damage estimated at 20 billion. This would have been greater were it not for an intense program of hazard mitigation activities over the previous two decades. Rebuilding or retrofitting structures to protect them from earthquakes is relatively cheap compared to the cost of rebuilding after an earthquake. For example, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency estimate the cost of retrofitting bridges to be just 22 of the cost if they are destroyed by earthquakes, and this does not take into account the cost to the local economy of the temporary loss of infrastructure. Although the cost of a dedicated InSAR mission is high (ca. 150-250million), a city saved from extensive earthquake damage after an InSAR forecast led to a major retrofitting program might consider the price tag cheap. A satellite-based system is also much cheaper than attempting to make similar measurements using...

Although the various activities carried out through these different programs are inextricably linked, they are managed largely as separate, isolated activities across the federal government. For example, many departments and agencies that are or will be engaged in climate response (e.g., Federal Emergency Management Agency, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Energy) have not been part of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and lack sufficient communication with the federal agencies that are developing knowledge they need. The USGCRP and the Climate Change Adaptation Task Force have largely been confined to convening representatives of relevant agencies and programs for dialogue, without mechanisms for making or enforcing important decisions and priorities. Moreover, even the USGCRP and the Climate Change Technology Program together do not appear sufficient for effectively coordinating the full portfolio of research needed to support climate change...

The Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA, also known as SARA Title III) requires certain companies to submit an annual report of the amount of listed toxic chemicals entering the environments. Source reduction and waste management information must be provided for the listed toxic chemicals.

The vast collection is intended as insurance against disaster so food production can be restarted anywhere should it be threatened by a regional or global catastrophe. When the depository was originally conceived in the early 1980s, the perceived threats came from nuclear war and geopolitical uncertainty. When the idea resurfaced in 2002, following the adoption by the UN of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, concerns about genetic resource loss from climate change brought new urgency and motivation to the concept.

Anthropogenic climate change, climate variability, and environmental degradation issues are among the big challenges of the twenty-first century. Greater responsibility has been imposed on farmers for climate-related risk management, and they must increasingly rely on climate forecast information for operational and strategic decision making. Advance warning of hazards and extreme climate anomalies at different time scales is therefore extremely important for them. Such early warning information can also form a crucial component of national regional disaster preparedness systems, which will help to minimize loss of life and property, including damage to agricultural investments (Ogallo, Boulahya, and Keane, 2000). Apart from the traditional weather information, agricultural systems would benefit from the following, among many others.

Natural disasters natural disasters The restructuring of farms continues as most of them apply survival tactics rather than a long-term strategy for improving efficiency 1 . Also, a great portion of subsistence, small commercial farms, and farming cooperatives are unable to adapt to evolving market, institutional and natural environment.10 There have been emerging private modes introducing incentives and possibilities for effective water and integral eco-management (codes of behavior, cooperation, vertical integration, classical or interlinked contracts) profiting from inter-dependent activities such as farming, water use and protection, fishing, recreation, processing, marketing etc. There are good examples for introduction and enforcement of private rules for use and protection of natural resources by farmers and users, and top eco-standards by individual farms or a vertical integrator. In recent years market-driven organic farming and trade with eco-products and services appeared...

The companion report Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change provides a summary of potential adaptation strategies for human health (NRC, 2010a). For example, public health systems need to be strengthened to enable rapid monitoring, identification of, and response to new climate change-related health risks as they arise. Other societal stresses such as poverty or economic disadvantages, chronic work-related risks or exposure to otherwise unhealthy environmental conditions, lack of access to preventive and ongoing health care, insufficient emergency preparedness, and related

West, have begun planning to address adaptation beyond infrastructure per se, including more efficient water markets. Although noninfrastructural strategies, such as improving emergency preparedness and response (above), have also been considered, in general there is insufficient concern with, or scientific understanding of, the underlying social-ecological vulnerabilities that cities and the people within them face (see Chapter 4). Many more ways to reduce vulnerability and enhance adaptive capacity may become available when the vulnerabilities of cities are better understood, particularly the vulnerability of subpopulations (e.g., the urban poor, minority groups, children, the elderly, or manual laborers Campbell-Lendrum and Corvalan, 2007) and the differences between large and smaller urban areas in different regions (e.g., Bartlett, 2008 Hardoy and Pandiella, 2009 Hess et al., 2008 Porfiriev, 2009 Thomalla et al., 2006). Urban areas adjacent to ecological reserves or bordering on...

In a world that sees a 2-meter (6.6-foot) sea level rise with continued flooding ahead, it will take extraordinary effort for the United States, or indeed any country, to look beyond its own salvation. All of the ways in which human beings have responded to natural disasters in the past, which John R. McNeill describes in chapter 2, could come together in one conflagration rage at government's inability to deal with the abrupt and unpredictable crises religious fervor and perhaps even a dramatic rise in millennial end-of-days cults hostility and violence toward migrants and minority groups, at a time of demographic change and increased global migration and intra-and interstate conflict over resources, particularly food and freshwater.

Rural communities in Niger and Uganda have begun to use the RANET system to improve dryland management, increase agricultural production, enhanced food security, and reduce vulnerability to natural disasters. The greatest benefits are realized in field sites where both the community FM radio and satellite multimedia link are functioning smoothly together, the multimedia link supplying timely drought monitoring and prediction information and FM radio supporting broad dissemination to food-insecure and disaster-prone communities. Together, RANET multimedia and FM community radio permit rural populations to blend local knowledge and new information according to their needs. However, even in sites where only community radio or multimedia services were established, the communication system has still resulted in vulnerability reductions for rural populations. Some of these benefits were the direct result of access to drought monitoring and prediction information, while others are the fruit...

There is a need for different shutdown procedures that involve massive shutdowns of entire plants, such as those that occur during hurricanes. One lesson learned from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita is that it is critical for chemical facilities to better coordinate with state and local emergency preparedness agencies, especially for decisions concerning mandatory evacuation orders which can directly impact plant shutdown sequence and timing (Challener, 2006). The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency advises that all industry sectors review past events associated with shutdowns during hazardous weather conditions and make administrative procedural, operational process equipment and hardware software safety improvements as needed (U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2010). Chemical facilities should also establish staff responsibilities and procedures to shut down process operations safely (U. S. Department of Energy, 2008). Almost a quarter of the events were caused when major...

The same country's approach to disaster preparedness and management is also instructive. Compared to the deaths and destruction in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, when Hurricane Michelle hit Cuba in 2001, only five lives were lost and recovery was quick. It was due to proper planning and a collective approach managed by government, but owned at the local level. Disasters expert Ben Wisner commented on the evacuation of 700,000 of Cuba's 11 million people

Non-climatic stresses can include poverty, unequal access to resources, food security, environmental degradation and risks from natural hazards 20.3, 20.4, 20.7, Chapter 17 Section 17.3.3 . Climate change itself can, in some places, produce its own set of multiple stresses total vulnerability to climate change, per se, is greater than the sum of vulnerabilities to specific impacts in these cases 20.7.2 .

The UNDP promotes conservation and sustainable biodiversity by helping client states and their composite communities maintain and develop the capacity to manage their indigenous biodiversity and ecosystems. This process not only seeks to sustain the indigenous biodiversity and ecosystems but also seeks to manage them so as to provide more food, fuel, sustainable livelihoods, and medicines in addition to better security and shelter. This process sometimes entails the development of clean water systems, improved disease control, and better preparedness for and reduced vulnerability to natural disasters. The UNDP helps these countries develop and then manage their agriculture, fisheries, forests, and other resources in a pro-poor approach oriented to developing marketable self-sustaining biotechnology.

Climate change may also affect the U.S. military through new and changed missions. The military has substantial logistical, engineering, and medical capabilities that have been used to respond to emergencies both in the United States and abroad (for example, the 2005 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2008 Burma Myanmar typhoon, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake). Because climate change is expected to increase the severity and possibly the number of storms, floods, droughts, and other climate-related natural disasters in many parts of the world, military preparedness planning and the role of the military in responding to such disasters needs to be considered as part of adaptation planning (NRC, 2010e). Again, much of the research that will be needed to support analysis of military involvement in disaster support overlaps with that needed for impact and vulnerability studies in other sectors.

The envisaged models below are based on Figs. 11.1 and 11.3, the summaries in Tables 11.1 and 11.2, and discussions of the homeothermic imperative. As discussed in Auliciems (1981, 1983), and Auliciems and de Dear (1997), cognitive-affective-effective control is a main interface between the biological and technological response, and one that should be central to the field of natural hazards risk-management research as defined in Burton et al. (1978), and Whyte (1985), and to coping with natural disasters (Alexander 1993). Indeed, given the earlier listed impacts and adaptations in Table 11.2, and the urban metabolism analogy, it would be surprising if at least temperatures or their thermal equivalents did not feature prominently in most third order systems within the human domain, in addition to the specific attributes of the hazard under consideration. Summaries of the three orders are as follows.

In addition to these focus areas, the USGCRP also has a series of cross-cutting activities. The Observing and Monitoring the Climate System interagency working group develops research in the planning and operation of observing systems, including several new Earth-observing satellites, suborbital systems, surface networks, reference sites, and process studies. These can supply reliable data on the Earth's climate system and can be helpful in the prevention of natural disasters. USGCRP sections and researchers are all involved in communications initiatives to improve public understanding of climate change research and to make scientific findings more accessible to different audiences. Finally, the interagency working group of International Research Cooperation works with major international scientific organizations on behalf of the U.S. government and the scientific community.

Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1991. This is a moderately advanced textbook on the science of natural hazards. Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA is the nation's premier agency that deals with emergency management and preparation and issues warnings and evacuation orders when disasters appear imminent. National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA). NASA's Web site on Natural Hazards Earth scientists around the world use NASA satellite imagery to better understand the causes and effects of natural hazards including climate change. This site posts many public domain images to help people visualize where and when natural hazards occur and to help mitigate their effects. All images in this section are freely available to the public for re-use or re-publication. Available online. URL Accessed January 30, 2008. National Weather Service. The National Weather Service, FEMA, and the Red Cross maintain a Web site dedicated to describing how to...

Acquisition of HWMs following Katrina was principally performed by three federal agencies USGS, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) (or a FEMA contractor). The State of Louisiana through the Louisiana State University (LSU) also helped recover HWM data. All entities participating in the IPET shared the data. Marks identified by USACE, FEMA, and LSU were also recovered by that respective agency. Most of the marks identified by USGS were recovered by FEMA (or a FEMA contractor). A subset of approximately 50 marks was also recovered by USGS field crews to confirm elevations provided by FEMA contractors. All HWMs were reviewed and assigned a reliability rating. The reliability of each HWM was assessed as Excellent, Good, Fair Poor, or Unknown if there was no information provided regarding the type of mark or setting in which it was acquired. Currently, there is not a standard method for determining HWM reliability. Moreover,...

Volcanic eruptions also affected human societies in Central America and the southern Andes. Sheets (2000) has advanced an intriguing hypothesis that more complex societies have greater difficulties coping with massive disruptions caused by volcanic eruptions than simple, egalitarian societies. This hypothesis implies that the vulnerability of human societies to climate change and climate extremes cannot be reduced by technological advances alone. On the contrary, technology, which produces a shift from a nature-dominated to a human-dominated environment, actually renders the societies more vulnerable to natural disasters (Messerli et al., 2000). Clearly there are lessons to be learned from the past, despite the fact that the interactions between environmental change and human societies are highly complex and regionally differentiated.

Some areas of a rain deficit and accentuated problems of drought linked to climate change'' suggesting that there is an increasing link between global warming and natural disasters such as droughts and flooding.'' The policy position of the WMO was produced at its 6th International Workshop on Tropical Cyclones in November 2006 when it stated that ''The surfaces of most tropical oceans have warmed by 0.25-0.5 degree Celsius during the past several decades. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) considers the likely primary cause of the rise in global mean surface temperature in the past 50 years is the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations'' (U.S. NOAA 2006b).

WHO supports actions to reduce human influence on the global climate while still recognizing the effect past emissions and human action have on the likelihood of warming and more variable climate for at least several decades. To alleviate this issue as well as reduce health vulnerability to future climate change, WHO supports programs for combating infectious diseases, improving water and sanitation, and ensuring response to natural disasters. In addition, research and effort are being put into building the capacity of health services and information to help adapt to climate changes.

One promising new technology that offers much promise is the application of seasonal to interannual climate forecasts. Disaster preparedness strategies, both of governments and NGOs, have begun to take account of such forecasts, and there is considerable interest in assigning them an economic value. The challenge of course is to reduce the gap between the information needed by small scale farmers and that provided by the meteorological services (Blench, and Marriage 1998 Lemos et al., 2002). As Stigter et al. (2005) noted, low-income farmers are interested in a broader range of characteristics of precipitation, notably, total rainfall, patchiness of rainfall, intensity, starting date, distribution of rainfall, end of the rains and prospects for dry spells and their length. It is precisely in this area that scientific extensions and improvements of response farming approach would bring highly needed solutions (Stewart, 1988). Demonstration projects such as the CLIMAG (Climate...

Warnings, quotes Mileti (1999) people typically are unaware of the hazards they face, underestimate those of which they are aware, overestimate their ability to cope when disaster strikes, often blame others for their losses, underutilize pre-impact hazard strategies, and rely heavily on emergency relief when the need arises. Clearly establishing the barriers to advice and policy uptake is an area in which further collaboration between biometeorologists, psychologists, public health professionals, and social scientists would prove valuable no one discipline has the training and expertise to identify, implement, and evaluate possible approaches.

With larger brains, these beings gradually became more adept at a range of survival skills. They could begin to draw on stored knowledge of how the game had behaved in previous years and thereby anticipate the same behavior the following year and in the future. Their improving communication skills would also have made possible increasingly clever and complex group hunting strategies. And they could use stones as crude missiles to bring down small game. These people also managed to spread out of Africa and across southern Asia. Yet, considering that 2 million years had elapsed since our genus first appeared, not much progress had been made toward modernity. Humans were still in the Stone Age, still living a hunter-gatherer life, and still making crude (but now slightly more sophisticated) stone tools.

Of farmlands typical of the midwestern United States. Bangladesh's per capita income is only 200, whereas Myanmar's is 1,900. The delta regions of Bangladesh and Myanmar are the respective country's most fertile. Farmers can expect to yield three rice crops per year, making them attractive place to live despite the risk of storm surges. With the continued population explosion in coastal regions of the Bay of Bengal and the paucity of fertile soils in higher grounds, the delta regions continue to be farmed by millions and continue to be hit by tropical cyclones like the 1970, 1990, 2007, and 2008 disasters. The lower death toll in the 2007 category 5 cyclone in Bangladesh compared with similar earlier storms demonstrates that investment in better warning systems and planned evacuations can save tens to hundreds of thousands of lives. The government of Myanmar has not opened itself to international aid, advice on emergency planning, and better protection of its population.

The megafauna mass extinction of the late Quaternary is now generally acknowledged by paleontologists and physical anthropologists to have occurred largely without the impact of global catastrophes such as sudden climatic change.53 In most cases, the megafauna extinctions began shortly after the first arrival of prehistoric humans. If we compare the number of genera of large mammals lost on the various continents, we find that Australia lost 94 per cent, North America 73 per cent, Europe 29 per cent, and Africa south of the Sahara 5 per cent.54 The first humans encountered animals that had evolved in the absence of human predators, and the animals were probably easily vanquished. Therefore, the most plausible explanation is that these extinctions were caused over the course of centuries and millennia by over-exploitation of relatively few, but growing numbers of big game hunters. Let us examine these extinctions in several geographical regions.

As used in this study, ecocide refers to certain acts that intend to disrupt or destroy species development and an entire ecosystem. Acts of war associated with ecocide include the use of weapons of mass destruction, whether nuclear, biological, or chemical, and attempts to provoke natural disasters such as volcanoes, earthquakes, or floods. In addition, ecocidal acts of warfare include the military use of defoliants, the use of explosives to impair soil quality and to enhance the prospect of disease the bulldozing of forest or croplands for military purposes attempts to modify weather or climate and the forcible and permanent removal of humans or animals from their places of habitation in the pursuit of military or other objectives.

Variables pertaining to sources of information, cognition, and decision-making lend themselves well to organizing the research in the natural hazards and societal impacts literature. In addition to health-related behaviours, PMT is also well-suited to model adaptive behaviour for weather and climate events (Grothmann and Patt 2005 Grothmann and Reusswig 2006 Prentice-Dunn, personal communication). Two meta-analyses of studies that employed PMT have been largely supportive of the model (Floyd et al. 2000 Milne et al. 2000). In addition, PMT has been evaluated favorably alongside other health behaviour models (Weinstein 1993).

The Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA, also known as Title III of SARA) was also enacted in 1986. The enactment of EPCRA stems directly from an incident involving the chemical release of methyl isocyanate from a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984 that killed thousands of nearby residents and the release of methylene chloride and aldicarb from a chemical plant in Institute, West Virginia, in 1985. EPCRA mandates that states and local communities prepare for chemical emergencies, requires facilities to notify their states and communities of the presence of an extremely hazardous substance and to report spills or releases of such substances immediately, and requires facilities to report annually on the amounts of certain hazardous chemicals produced, used, and stored within the facility if that amount exceeds a specified amount.

Clearly the universality of homeostasis, and the ubiquitous nature of thermoregulation, does not sit well with the soft determinism semantics or concepts of either mainstream IPCC (2001) or its progenitor the Chicago school of Natural Hazards (as in Burton et al.1978). Marginalization of the significance of active biological impact -adaptation processes, can be seen in the seminal contribution by Bob Kates (1985) This surprising anachronism probably stems from the determinist-free will schism within Geography and from Natural Hazards work which had focused on differentiating cultural attitudes and perceptions. According to Burton et al. (1978) the process of biological adaptation is generally slow it cannot play a significant role in the short term responses to natural hazards (p. 36), but biological adaptations may also involve numerous mechanisms for temporary physiological responses in the face of hazards (p. 39). Seemingly over time human biological processes have atrophied to...

Drought impacts, however, are not the result only of insufficient rainfall or searing temperature. In most cases, drought impacts are the outcome of the interaction of a number of social and other human factors that can heighten the vulnerability of communities and various exposure units (e.g., vegetation) and reduce resilience of society and ecosystems to the natural hazard (Dilley, 2000 Vogel et al, 2000). As a result of these components of drought, a number of impacts are recorded.

Time tends to make people forget about risks associated with natural hazards. For events that occur only every couple of hundred years, several generations may pass between catastrophic events, and each generation remembers less about the risks than the previous generation. This character of human nature was unfortunately illustrated by another earthquake in central China, nearly 400 years later. In 1920, a large earthquake in Haiyuan, in the Ningxia Authority of northern Shaanxi Province, caused about 675 major landslides in deposits of loess, killing another 100,000-200,000 people. Further south in 2008, the May 12 magnitude 7.9 earthquake in Sichuan Province similarly initiated massive landslides that killed an estimated 87,587 people.

Mass wasting is one of the most costly of natural hazards, with the slow downslope creep of material causing billions of dollars in damage to properties every year in the United States. Earth movements do not kill many people in most years, but occasionally massive landslides take thousands or even hundreds of thousands of lives. Mass wasting is becoming more of a hazard in the United States as people move in great numbers from the plains into mountainous areas as population increases. This trend is expected to continue in the future, and more mass-wasting events like those described in this chapter may be expected every year. Good engineering practices and understanding of the driving forces of mass wasting will hopefully prevent many mass-wasting events, but it will be virtually impossible to stop the costly gradual downslope creep of material, especially in areas with freeze thaw cycles.

The intensity of intervention activities varies widely from community to community, region to region, and country to country. Many areas recognize that heat is possibly the major weather-related health issue in their jurisdiction, and these areas tend to have the most elaborate intervention systems. The development of HHWWS in many regions has enhanced awareness and stakeholder collaboration one good example is Seattle, USA, where prior to the establishment of a HHWWS in 2005, no heat advisories were ever issued by the local National Weather Service office. This cool, marine city did not consider heat to be a major (or even minor) health issue. Today, not only are advisories being issued utilizing a new synoptic-based HHWWS, but the city and surrounding communities have developed a comprehensive intervention plan, fact sheets on how people and agencies should respond to the heat, and recently the area sponsored a highly successful Partners for Preparedness Conference attended by the...

A close encounter by a large object posing a serious but still uncertain threat of a global catastrophe. Critical attention by astronomers is needed to determine conclusively whether a collision will occur. If the encounter is less than three decades away, governmental contingency planning may be warranted. A very close encounter by a large object, which if occurring this century, poses an unprecedented but still uncertain threat of a global catastrophe. For such a threat in this century, international contingency planning is warranted, especially to determine urgently and conclusively whether a collision will occur.

One of the deadliest natural disasters in history unfolded on December 26, 2004, when a great undersea earthquake with a magnitude of 9.0 triggered a tsunami that devastated many coastal areas of the Indian Ocean, killing an estimated 283,000 people. The Sumatra-Andaman earthquake had an epicenter located 100 miles (160 km) off the west coast of Sumatra, and struck at 7 58 a.m. local time. This was a very unusual earthquake, in that the rupture (and quake) lasted between eight and 10 minutes, one of the longest times ever recorded for an earthquake. The hypocenter, or point of first energy release, was located 19 miles (30 km) below sea level, and the rupture length of the fault extended to a remarkable 750 miles (1,200 km) along the coast of Sumatra. Shaking from the earthquake was felt as far away as India, Thailand, Singapore, and the Maldives. The energy released by this earthquake was so great that it set the whole planet into a set of slow oscillations where all locations on the...

It is now technically feasible to map and track many of the large objects that could be on an Earth-impacting trajectory, and this is being done to some degree. Greater efforts would involve considerable expense to advanced societies, principally the taxpayers of the United States. NASA, working with the United States Air Force, has mounted a preliminary program for mapping and tracking objects in near-Earth orbit and has already identified many significant objects. Lawmakers and the public must decide if the calculated risk of the hazards of impacts hitting the Earth is worth greater expense. Risk assessment typically involves many variables, such as the likelihood of an event happening, how many deaths or injuries would result, and what can be done to reduce the risk. Also, other questions need to be asked, such as is it more realistic to try to stop the spread of disease, crime, poverty, and famine and prepare for other natural disasters than to spend resources looking for objects...

High alpine seasonal snow covers are present in mountainous areas around the world. The duration and spatial distribution of alpine snow covers is extremely variable and depends mainly on the geographical location, the climatic conditions, and the elevation of the mountain range. Alpine snow covers are of large economic and social importance in many areas, for example as a water resource for hydropower or as a base for tourism. In all alpine areas the snow cover is an important climate element because of its high albedo and low surface temperature. However, seasonal alpine snow covers may also cause natural hazards such as avalanches or flooding. The snow cover of the Alps - situated in the heart of densely populated Europe -meets all the above-mentioned issues and therefore considerable research effort has been spent towards its investigation.

Lives would have been saved if adequate heat-health warning services (HHWS) had been activated in Europe in 2003, as promoted by the WMO WHO UNEP showcase projects in Rome and Shanghai. Such systems are based on biometeorological forecasts (Fig. 2.8) expecting exceeding of an agreed threshold (heat load forecast). The following interventions (based on a locally adjusted emergency response plan) are the responsibility of public health services PHS. HHWSs must be prepared in advance with complete descriptions of all processes and clear definition of the interface between NMHS and PHS (Koppe et al. 2004 WMO 2004 Kovats and Jendritzky 2006 EPA 2006 WMO 2007) (see also Chapter 3). The most important module is a locally adjusted disaster preparedness (emergency response) plan based on a specific mitigation strategy. This plan becomes active whenever a heat load event is expected. The scopes concerned, intervention measures, and responsible agencies, decision-makers, stakeholders, and other...

Reef ecosystems, comprising rugose and tabulate corals and stromatoporoid sclerosponges, underwent a major crisis. Among the rest, both marine invertebrates (ammon-oids, brachiopods, trilobites) and vertebrates (conodonts, agnathan and armoured placoderm fish) suffered severe extinctions. The land record is much less clear, but there could have been an important extinction among plants.

Global oceanic and atmospheric circulation patterns undergo frequent shifts that affect large parts of the globe, particularly those arid and semiarid parts affected by Hadley Cell circulation. One of the better known variations in global circulation is known as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation. Fluctuations in global circulation can account for natural disasters, including the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s in the U.S. plains states. Similar global climate fluctuations may explain the drought, famine, and desertification of parts of the Sahel and the great famines of Ethiopia and Sudan in the 1970s, 1980s, and mid-2000s. Much of Africa, including the Sahel region, has become increasingly dry and desert-like over the past 100 years or more, and any attempts to restart agriculture and repopulate regions evacuated during previous famines in this region may be fruitless and lead to further loss of life.

Aim of weather and climate modification was improvement of the natural state or mitigation of natural hazards, whereas the aim of recent geoengineer-ing proposals is the mitigation of anthropogenic hazards. Weather and climate modification therefore had two of the three defining attributes (Section 10.2.1) of geoengineering - scale and intent - but not the third, as it was not a countervailing measure. The case for continuity rests on the similarity of proposed technical methods, the continuity of citations to earlier work, a similarity of debate about legal and political problems, and finally, the strong resemblance of climate and weather modification to geoengineering as defined here.

Adaptation will involve adjustment or coping processes as a function of the magnitude of the weather or climate event and of the timeframe in which adaptation is required (i.e., before, during, or after the event, Lazarus and Cohen 1977). These variables (nature of the event and relationship to time) give rise to three types of psychological adaptation to weather and climate. First, adaptation can occur as proaction and preparation ahead of a wide variety of weather events (Easterling et al. 2004 Grothmann and Patt 2005). The author refers to this as primary adaptation, borrowing from a classification used in public health (Caplan 1964). Viewed in this manner, primary adaptation could involve such long-term efforts as educating children about weather, climate, and other natural disasters through a program such as the American Red Cross' Masters of Disaster school curriculum (American National Red Cross 2000). Other more immediate and personal, primary adaptations could involve...

One of the worst natural disasters of the 21st century unfolded on December 26, 2004, following a magnitude 9.0 (some estimates are as high as 9.3, a threefold difference in energy released) earthquake off the coast of northern Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. The earthquake was the largest since the 1964 magnitude 9.2 earthquake event in southern Alaska, and released more energy than all the earthquakes on the planet in the last 25-30 years combined. During this catastrophic earthquake a segment of the sea-floor the size of California, lying above the Sumatra subduction zone trench, suddenly moved upward and seaward by several tens of feet. The slip event continued for nearly 10 minutes as the central section of the faulted area moved 65 feet (20 m) and the rupture propagated laterally more than 600 miles (1,000 km). The sudden displacement of this volume of undersea floor displaced a huge amount of water and generated the most destructive tsunami known in recorded history.

Floods are the most common natural hazard and have also proven to be the deadliest and costliest of all natural disasters in history. Individual floods have killed upwards of a million people in China on several occasions, and cause billions of dollars of damage annually in different parts of the world. The risk of flooding increases with time as many countries are allowing settlements on floodplains and even encouraging commercial and residential growth on floodplains known to experience floods at frequencies of every several to every couple of hundred years. As world population continues to grow and people move into harm's way on floodplains, this problem will only worsen. Further, as the climate changes, some areas will experience more rainfall while others experience drought, so areas that may be relatively safe on floodplains now may be frequently inundated with floodwaters in the near future. Development of floodplains should not proceed without proper scientific analysis of the...